Hoang’s Tactics Have Pushed Me Way Beyond My Own Skillset.
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I’ve been playing Age of Empires (AoE) for several months, but I’ve realized that I’m not good at managing or creating large numbers of units.
I often fail to build up my economy or create an army beyond the middle Castle Age, despite having many villagers.
As a result, I’ve decided to focus on playing the early game by drushing and sending forward villagers to win with a Mangonel and a Monk.
However, my 12 minute Feudal time is no longer effective at my current Elo of 1050, where most opponents rush into scouts or mass archers.
I need to improve my skills, but I don’t know whether to learn how to boom, avoid spending half of the game in Feudal age, or lame boars like Hoang.
Any tips would be appreciated, as I want to devour more Town Centers in the game.
I have the exact opposite problem!
I die often in Feudal or early castle.
But once I get to Imp and beyond, my winrate is hovering around 70%.
So perhaps we can combined into some sort of super AOE2 player?
Or if we are unlucky we will get your late game and my early game and then we’re screwed haha.
So here is some advice for the late game (I am 1300 ELO for context):
**1) 3 TC boom**
Get used to going 3 TC boom as soon you hit castle age.
Yes in some games this can be a mistake (like if opponent is going all-in hard on 1 TC) but more often than not it’s the right choice.
I know our peasant skills are hard to compare to pros, but I have often seen Hera just 3 TC boom despite being pressured hard and this allows him to take the game if he survives the storm, which he almost always does.
**2) Collect at least 1200 Wood by the time you hit castle Age**
In order to successfully pull off 1), you need lots of wood!
I can’t stress this enough!
The worst thing that can happen to you is you built lots of farms in feudal to get to castle age fast, and then you neglected to collect enough wood on your way up.
You hit castle age, plunk down 2 TC’s and now are out of wood but have more than 500 food in the bank!
I would say having 1200 Wood when you hit castle age is not overkill.
If you think about it makes sense. 2 TCs will cost 550W, Bow Saw another 100W, any of the castle age buildings (monastery, siege workshop, university) will cost you another 200W.
That’s around 850 Wood right of the bat.
If you are going elite skirms, that’s 230 W for the upgrade.
If you are going siege/university, you will need lots more wood either for siege units or ballistics (which is why you are probably building the university).
Not to mention, it is also around this time that your first 5 or 6 farms will start expiring which will drain your wood even more.
**3) Continue making vils till you hit AT LEAST 130**
Just keep spamming them.
Based on what you wrote I sense you don’t make enough vils.
You said *”….
failing to make an army despite having 80 or more villagers….”* which to me seems like you consider 80 vils to be a lot…
it’s not! 150 is a lot!
Just keep making them.
Your Eco will thank you for it.
If you find yourself in the late stages of the game with 145 vils, and tons of collected resources, you can always just delete vils.
At this stage of the game, with all the chaos you will inevitably have a dozen or more idle vils.
You can delete them!
This will send a message to the rest to get busy!
**4) Make production buildings**
I am often guilty of this and this has lost me the game more often than I care to remember.
You do 1,2 and 3 and then all of a sudden you realize you have more resources than you can spend!
This is a huge mistake.
You should in theory have almost no resources banked up unless you are saving up for something specific (Imp, tech etc)
You should plunk down lots of production buildings.
Not 4 stables if you want to go cav.
Not 6 stables.
You want 12+ stables.
If you have spare wood, why not make 6 more?
Not only do increase your unit production speed, but you also increase the size of your base and slow down your opponents attack.
Have you every tried to attack an opponents base, say by going for his TCs castle and you found a million enemy production buildings in the way?
If you want to take them down, it takes forever.
If you ignore them, now you find yourself in a maze of enemy production buildings.
Not only can he spawn units on top of you, fighting in this environment is advantageous for him because some of your units will inevitably target the buildings themselves and not units, thus giving him a huge advantage.
**5) Expand**
This ties in with point 3 and 4 When you have lot of vils (more than 130) and lots of production buildings, you want to expand to other areas of the map.
Don’t be afraid to make new TCs.
It’s ok to builds 3 more TCs during the game.
They afford protection to your vils from raids and allow you to collect more than 1 resource (say wood and stone/gold).
If you have 130 vils working in your small starting base, not only will they be bumping into each other like mad, your enemy will have a much easier time of damaging your eco when they get their cavaliers into your base.
**6) Raid or be Raided (or usually both!)**
Given that you are doing 5) (and so is your opponent), there are many juicy targets!
I have often resigned a game, looked at the map and realized my opponent had dozens of vils working in remote locations of the map with zero military units defending them.
A group of 4 or 5 knights would have absolutely wrecked my opponents eco if only I had explored.
APM and attention is a resource.
Even small raids will make your opponent scramble and take away his attention from other areas, not to mention it will damage his eco.
Or it’s even possible that he is so focused on the main battle that he doesn’t realize 10 hussars are just happily killing all his vils.
On that note, keep a watchful eye on your own base to stay safe.
If you can manage it, there is nothing wrong with stone walling.
Even if you have to spend 300 to 400 stone to do so, staying safe is worth it.
**7) Don’t research techs you will not use**
Try not to be all over the place with researching techs.
I had so many games where I researched expensive techs and then barely used them.
Like you research Paladin, produce 15 and that’s it.
Complete waste of resources.
Decide what you want to go for and commit to it.
Now your turn to give me tips how not to die to maa rushes and the first 6 archers!
I wouldn’t waste time on learning how to lame.
Just learn the game properly.
I haven’t seen your actual games, so it’s hard for me to say what your real issues are.
Before you were trying to play like Hoang, what did your builds look like?
Your issue may be as simple as lacking proper build orders and eco management.
Luckily learning build orders is actually easy to do, since you can just do it over and over again without wasting much time.
Once you got that down better, you can learn to do it while doing military/attacking at the same time.
By the way, knowing proper eco management is actually extremely important if you want to play like Hoang.
Contrary to what many people believe, Hoang is actually a lot better at eco management than it looks.
When he skips eco upgrades, idles his TC, etc.
it’s calculated.
It’s part of his build order.
So I would suggest to revisit the basics before really getting too deep into that.
But it’s up to you.
You can play however you like.
But if you want to get better, knowing build orders and eco management is a must.
“Habe”.
God my eyes!
Why did I see it just before clicking send?
Got the same problem.
Around 950 1v1 and 900 team because I am bad with big population.
Specially in team games I am sometimes +1500 points of the other players halfway in castle age on nomad.
On other maps +700 sometimes…
1v1 my 1000 elo strat is M@A into archers, around 950 scouts rush.
Other tactics 850 or something
You’ll have to improve at all of the above if you don’t want to one-trick even harder.
Someone would have to watch your recs for something specific to you.
My suggestion is learn a few build orders.
If you can drush you can do anything.
Learn scouts into skirms, learn maa archers, and learn straight archers.
Those 3 are the best for arabia.
You can absolutely continue to drush if you’re good at it and you like it.
Drush fc us viable on Arabia at your level if you can be annoying enough with your drush
20 plus 2 siege and monk
Hoanging pushed my ELO too.
I have the same issues, low APM, cannot manage both eco and army.
So I started to find all in strats for each map.
My ELO went up to 1200, from 900.
For Arabia, I go Cuman tati rush, make 3 range archers and rams.
Eat their TC right when they are about to hit castle age so they can’t make a mangonel.
For arena my best bet is Khmer Hoang push with 23 pop up castle age.
Hope to finish them before they can get a castle up.
Well, you’re going to to hit a wall eventually if the only way you want to play is by acting like your opponent’s annoying little brother.
Trying learning any of the hundreds of other skill sets that are out there.
The advice for any player below 1400 elo is the same.
Your dark age sucks.
I don’t have to see your gameplay to know your dark age sucks.
Sort it out and you will easily gain elo.
Practice booming.
Play a skirmish vs an easy ai on arena and just practice the boom.
I think a bench mark of 100 pop in 30 minutes game time is workable.
Also for booming you HAVE to have a select all tcs hotkey.
So you can queue up say 15 vils across 3 or 4 tcs simultaneously.
Do whatever you like and do it a bit better
How do you check apm?
You need to learn the ‘Select All’ hotkeys for production buildings and set them to something that is easier to press.
This goes in particular for your ‘Select All Town Centers’ hotkey.
Go play Huns Death Match, you can even do it against AIs now (they are not as good but still challenging if you are not use to boom).
It is a game mode that forces you into building a lot of things and control large armies.
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